Lee, Christine Kim-eng

This article provides a concrete illustration of how teachers in a primary school in Singapore discuss students’ learning in a lesson study cycle and grew professionally as a community. Specifically, we examined how collaboratively analysing students’ work serves as a useful practice for teachers to learn to work with diverse learners.. The findings suggested that open discussions around students’ work helped teachers to reflect upon their unwarranted perceptions of their students and their teaching. The study provided insights into how teachers’ understandings of their students’ diverse backgrounds, as well as teachers’ understanding of subject content and pedagogy, developed as they participated in lesson study activities that were focused on analysing students’ work. Our findings found that lesson study provided the following affordances to foster such changes: (1) eliciting hypotheses in dialogue; (2) creating space for alternative perspectives; (3) collaboratively scrutinizing student learning evidence for follow-up teaching; and (4) identifying problems for further discussion. While the illustration of this case is uniquely Singaporean, implications include concerns about teacher professional learning and teaching for equity common to many other educational contexts.

Japanese lesson study (LS), jugyu kenkyuu, is becoming an increasingly popular and important model for teacher learning and professional development (PD) worldwide. The spread of lesson study globally as well as in Singapore schools has been phenomenal. In Singapore, it was first introduced in 2004 and is now widely implemented as a tool for promoting professional learning communities (PLCs). This rapid diffusion of lesson study in many educational systems raises questions related to the quality of lesson studies practiced in schools as well as its sustainability, especially with change of school leadership. A national survey and case studies of schools implementing lesson study in Singapore have provided some insights into these issues. The hope is that lesson study will be practiced in the right spirit and substance and not be a passing fad in schools.

Many teachers have voiced their frustration in trying to teach academic geography courses to their less able pupils. Such pupils appear to be lacking in basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy. Their poor concentration span and limited retention of information have made it difficult for teachers to arouse their interest or stimulate sustained efforts (Pick and Renwick, 1984). The prevalent forms of expository teaching found in most classrooms do not meet the need of less able pupils for variety. 'Variety' is the keyword when teaching less able pupils - variety of resources, teaching strategies, content, tasks, locations and in class organisation. The example of the role play described in this article is an attempt to provide classroom teachers with a teaching strategy that will break the monotony of expository teaching.

How student voice is viewed is complex. Increasingly, effort has been made to include student voice in teaching and learning, with student voice positioned in different ways, from the instrumental to the transformative. The success and sustainability of student voice efforts require a more critical understanding of the participatory efforts of both teachers and students, as well as the interplay between teachers’ and students’ voices. Using a case-study approach, within an interpretive paradigm, this study explores teachers’ and students’ discourses on student voice at the beginning of a larger study situated within five English Language classrooms in Singapore. The findings highlight the discursive framings of both teachers and students and foreground spaces of convergence and divergence. Both teachers and students share similar views on the possibilities and promises of student voice in teaching and learning, which centred largely around pedagogic and performative reasons. The data also revealed a shared sense of vulnerability and fear, surfacing real, yet tacit and lesser known boundaries and issues which both teachers and students see as affecting student voice efforts. The findings suggest that student voice work needs to be situated in an environment of trust and authentic listening to harness its potential.

The urgency of teaching diverse learners is aptly demonstrated in many parts of the world as the ethnic, racial, class, and linguistic diversity grows rapidly. Such diversity not only brings about opportunities for creative teaching, but also challenges for ensuring educational equity and providing high-quality teaching for all students from diverse backgrounds, especially those presently underserved by the educational system (Buehl, & Beck, 2014; Civitillo, Juang, & Schachner, 2018). Researchers have found that teachers prepared for working with students from diverse cultural backgrounds need to embrace beliefs that recognize the strengths of cultural diversity (Anagnostopoulos, 2006; Banks et al., 2005; Fives & Buehl, 2014; Gay, 2010). Thus, exploring and challenging teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity should constitute a major objective in teacher professional learning. However, only a few studies have examined how in-service teachers’ beliefs are enacted and shaped in professional learning community practices (Little, 2003; Tam, 2015; Turner, 2011), and focused even less on teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity (Pang, 2005; Sleeter, 1992). There are a few studies examining teachers’ cultural beliefs about diversity in Singapore, and found that Singaporean teachers are influenced by prevailing political ideologies, and have ambiguous perceptions towards students from less advantaged backgrounds (Anderson, 2015; Alviar-Martin & Ho, 2011; Dixon & Liang, 2009; Ho & Alviar-Martin, 2010; Ho et al., 2014; Lim & Tan, 2018). However, these studies discussed teachers’ individual perceptions of disadvantaged learners without further exploring how these perceptions are mediated by influences from professional development practices, where teachers’ cultural beliefs about diversity issues are in (inter)action as ideas emerge, clash, change, and (dis)agree with each other when teachers work together.

Kyouzai kenkyuu, or the “study of materials for teaching”, is a critical yet often neglected phase in lesson study adopted in countries beyond Japan. In this phase, teachers carefully examine curriculum documents, textbooks, teaching and learning materials, and subject matter and read relevant research to inform the development of a unit within which is embedded the research lesson. However, teachers often fail to engage adequately in kyouzai kenkyuu. Given its importance, it is crucial for teachers to understand the essence of kyouzai kenkyuu and conduct this phase of lesson study beyond a superficial level. In this chapter, we will explain the main inquiry processes involved in kyouzai kenkyuu, provide some guidelines for lesson study practitioners, and illustrate these ideas using two snapshots of practice from our work with teachers.

The phenomenal spread of Japanese lesson study (LS) beyond Japan is indicative of the perception that the seemingly obvious routines of LS are transferable into foreign contexts. It is, however, to be expected, that various aspects of LS would be adapted to suit the culture of the adopting context. The diverse ways in which LS is adapted across different contexts provides the opportunity for researchers to unpack what needs to be done to better adapt, implement and sustain LS to support teacher development across non-Japanese contexts. This paper is based on the findings from a nation-wide research project undertaken to explore the adaptations made to LS in Singapore schools. Surveys and case studies provided data to examine LS structure and implementation processes in Singapore schools and to investigate school leaders’ and teachers’ experiences and understandings of LS processes. In teasing out the subtle differences among the Singaporean adaptations and Japanese LS, we gleaned a deeper understanding of the cultural and contextual factors that elucidate key features of LS that are pertinent in creating the necessary conditions for effective teacher learning.